Space Squirrels, the Most Beautiful Youth, Glass Brains

John Green joins the show to talk about how Everything is Tuberculosis -- which is coincidentally the name of his new book. Plus, Lauren talks about sending squirrels into space, and Rachel explains how brains can (very rarely) turn to glass. Check out John's new book: https://everythingistb.com/ The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories! Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get an additional 20% OFF the @honeylove Holiday sale by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST #honeylovepod If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, "I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York," or, "Why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse?" We also solve non-car-related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts, or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 0:38Rachel Feltman?

  At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  And I'm Lauren Leffler.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  And I'm John Green.

• 1:01Rachel Feltman?

  John, welcome to the show.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled.

• 1:06Rachel Feltman?

  Well, you and Hank are some of our most frequently requested guests from fans. I have to, it's really my own fault, since I had Bill Nye on, everybody thinks I just have a group chat with all of their favorite nerds. And they're like, "Why don't you just have the Green Brothers on?" And I'm like, "Well, they're very busy." They don't know the person.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Especially Hank, I'm actually not that busy, but Hank is.

• 1:31Rachel Feltman?

  Well, we're thrilled to have you, and I understand you have a new book to tell us about.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  I do have a new book coming out. It's called Everything is Tuberculosis. It's about the history and present of tuberculosis, not just through a science lens, although the science lens is super important to me, but also through the lens of social history and anthropology and lots of other lenses. So I'm excited for the book. Comes out on March 18th, and yeah, it's exciting.

• 1:58Rachel Feltman?

  Awesome. Well, congratulations on that, and we are excited to hear some weird stuff from the book, I hope. But let's get right into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, Start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was in a, you know, casual, non-competitive way. Lauren, welcome back. What's your tease?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's great to be back. My tease this week is squirrels could be the key to getting humans into deep space.

• 2:43Rachel Feltman?

  What can't they do? I can't wait to hear more about that.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  It makes me, it makes me wonder whether it's like squirrel intelligence or squirrel meat.

• 2:56Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, we're gonna squirrel farms on Mars. That's the future.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what we, that's, that's what's been missing.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta whisper that in Elon's ear. It's gonna change the entire course of the federal government.

• 3:07Rachel Feltman?

  Change the game.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:09Rachel Feltman?

  Um, John, what's your tease?

• 3:12Speaker 03

  My tease is that the fella who helped invent the Industrial Revolution also tried to cure tuberculosis.

• 3:22Rachel Feltman?

  Hmm, a busy guy. My tease is that today I'm gonna talk about how if you're very, very lucky, parts of you might turn into glass one day.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 3:34Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Fingers crossed.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  I wanna, I wanna hear the squirrel stuff.

• 3:39Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, the squirrel stuff is, that is the tease to beat. So Lauren, I think you gotta kick us off.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, I, I hope I didn't oversell it, but the squirrels are pretty incredible. So I hope they, I hope they keep you engaged, listeners and the people in this video conferencing room, whatever this platform is called. Okay, so I'm not quite a weirdest thing regular yet, so I don't 100% know the drill, but is it okay if I start with a question?

• 4:05Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Like, can I ask you about the question to start? Okay. So can each of you just like, very briefly, a couple of words, tell me what you imagine when you picture a hibernating animal? Like, when you think about a hibernating bear or groundhog, what is it doing?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  I feel like it's actually sort of turning around in its den. Just like yawning and then going back to sleep. And then like an hour later, kind of turning around in its den again and yawning again.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  So just in a perpetual state of trying to like settle down and get comfy for a big long nap.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  That's just the nap. That's what I imagine. Maybe that's because that's how I sleep.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  So like not particularly restfully.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Not, not very well. Uh, that's what I'm, I'm, it can't be great sleep. That's, so that's my imagination, but I have no idea.

• 4:56Rachel Feltman?

  I, um, as usual, I am like the wrong person to do a like straw man pull on because all I can think about is that one of the facts I've been working on for weirdest thing is something about how bears apparently like stuff their butts with moss before hibernating, which I'm still working on fact checking, by the way, but, uh, people in the internet say that they do.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I did not know that one, but, uh, that's intriguing to me.

• 5:25Rachel Feltman?

  TBD. There's a reason it's not my fact today, but, um, yeah. So right now, when you say hibernating animal, I'm just like, uh, moss, moss in butt. That's all. But again, I'm usually the wrong person to ask these kinds of questions to.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I, I think it's beautiful that you can take us down a completely different path, a mossy butt path, as opposed to where I was trying to get us to go, which was closer to John's answer, which I think is most people's idea is that hibernating animals are, are sleeping, right? Like, that's what we're kind of taught at an early age in elementary school education. Uh, it's what I thought up until a couple of months ago, that all hibernating animals are just taking like a big long snooze. The bear has on some flannel pajamas. It's like curled up through the winter, literal sleepy time, T bear stuff. The, the problem is that it's, it's basically totally wrong. Um, hibernation is, uh, it's way more complicated than just a long nap. So much is happenating, happenating, so much is happening in a hibernating animal's body.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  It's, um, like a complete transformation of brain and organ systems. Uh, it is closer to death than sleep is what a few scientists I've interviewed told me.

• 6:35Rachel Feltman?

  What a metal phrase.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I actually like completely unprompted, two separate scientists said that exact sentence, it is closer to death than sleep. And there's a lot about it we still don't understand. But some really, really big research players are interested in figuring it out, namely NASA, the European Space Agency, and a handful of other private aerospace companies. Why, you might ask, because learning how to get humans to hibernate could be fundamental to propelling humans into deep space. For a whole lot of reasons I plan to explain, not just the super obvious ones. But first, we have to talk about squirrels. Not the ones that live in trees, but the ones that live underground. So there's a bunch of

• 7:21Speaker 02

  different species of ground squirrels, a lot of which are hibernators, and in like a particularly extreme way. So one species, 13 line ground squirrels, they live across North America, in the prairies, from Texas up into Canada. They can hibernate without any food or water for more than half the year, like up to eight months at a time.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And like, nothing, no calories in, no liquids in. While they're in hibernation torpor, their metabolic rate crashes by as much as 95%. Their heart and respiration rates go down to just a few beats or breaths per minute. Their brainwaves plateau, totally flat, negligible activity. Quote, "It's even less activity than a coma state," is what Kelly Drew, a hibernation scientist at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska told me. And kind of like indicative of all of this biological craziness, their body temperature falls below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And a different species, Arctic ground squirrels, their bodies actually super cool. So their temperature falls below freezing, like their core body temperature.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Ice crystals don't form, though. Science is still trying to figure out why and how that's possible. But despite not actually being frozen, a hibernating ground squirrel does feel like it's just been chilling in your freezer. I got to hold one at a Yale Medical School lab run by Elena Gratcheva. So I was holding this like 13 lined hibernating ground squirrel. And the the very first thought I had was this is this is a squirrel popsicle. It's little body.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  It was curled up. It was like almost completely rigid. I was wearing a glove, but it was so cold. I could feel it through it. It was like holding a big, heavy or big for an ice cube, but like small for an animal. Squirrel sicle in my hands. It was kind of mind blowing. So all that happens, like these squirrel bodies basically almost entirely shut down. They're teetering on the brink of life. And then suddenly, still in hibernation, the squirrels become active and alert. So kind of, John, you were right about this, that there's some back and forth between like sleeping in air quotes, torpor and then activity. So the squirrels, they'll have about two to three weeks at a time of complete torpor, like at that like comatose stage.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Sounds like me the last couple of weeks, actually.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Fair. And then suddenly they're like active again for one to two days at a time. They have these sudden bursts of activity, but still they don't get hungry. They don't get thirsty. They don't eat or drink and they don't leave their burrows. So there's still like this whole suite of biological suppression happening. But they like come back online and then they go back into torpor again. One scientist told me they still don't know 100% why this is happening. But in her view, it's kind of like why you have to start a car every so often in the winter. They just got to get like all their systems back in sync and online and then they can go into torpor again. And throughout all of this process, which goes on for months, a few things are notably not happening.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  So they're not really losing muscle density. Like they maintain their kind of squirrel swole throughout this entire process. They lose a lot of weight, but it's almost entirely like the burnable fat that they were purposely storing for that purpose. They start hibernation in in kind of a quasi squirrel diabetic state because they had to bulk up so much.

• 10:50Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, they were bulking. Now they're in a cut. They're going to come out.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  And and that diabetic state, it like completely abates without leaving any lasting harm to their. Bodies or pancreases, their little squirrel pancreases. They don't incur any brain or organ damage from like the severe deprivation. And in fact, their body systems might be like recovering and they might have some organ regeneration going on during all of this. Research indicates they're like not aging almost. It's like it slows to the point where they're aging.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  I want a squirrel map. Yeah. Sounds good. It's starting to sound pretty good. And the squirrel species that hibernate, so they live a lot longer than the ones that don't. We're talking, these are rodents with like nine year lifespans versus arboreal tree squirrels that don't hibernate that live maybe like two to three years. So it's not really sleep, but it is kind of like the ultimate and restorative rest. And like you said, Rachel, it sounds pretty good, right? It makes you wonder like, hmm, what if we could do that? And, uh, you know, again, if you're thinking that, you're on the same page as NASA, who has been floating the possibility of human hibernation since the 1960s. And so now we're getting to the space travel part.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  There's a lot of difficulty in, in getting people out beyond Earth's orbit for long-term space travel or planetary habitation, becoming an interplanetary species. A lot of those challenges could be like potentially addressed by harnessing the power of squirrel hibernation. So, um, for one, you know, there's the issue of time and aging. If we're sending people on missions that take years or decades to complete, the idea of putting their like bodily decline on hold while in transit, obviously appealing. But then there's kind of like the less apparent difficulty of transporting all of the resources human need for survival. So again, squirrels underground, they go months without any food or water. Food and water is super heavy, transporting, it takes a lot of fuel.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  One way to cut back on all of that might be putting astronauts into some sort of like torpor-esque reduced metabolic state. And at the same time, the process could help with some of the health issues that astronauts experience in space. So muscle wasting is a huge, is a huge issue at low gravity. Astronauts, as it is, even just out on the International Space Station, have to exercise hours a day to prevent their bodies from disintegrating, even on short visits of just a couple of weeks. But what if they didn't have to? What if they could just chill out in hibernation torpor and their muscles would stay perfectly intact? Another big one is cosmic radiation exposure. And this is actually what the European Space

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Agency is kind of like most interested in at this particular moment. But traveling in space means getting continually bombarded with X-rays and gamma rays at levels way higher than what we experience on Earth. That makes astronauts at increased risk of cancers. But again, hibernation could help because body systems slow down so much that cell and DNA replication also slow down. So there's just way fewer chances for radiation to damage cells' genetic codes when an animal is in torpor. Yeah, so you could, you could knock out like four or five difficulties of human space travel with just, just one squirrelsicle. Thank you for laughing.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  I love the phrase in torpor. I want to be, I want to be in torpor more often.

• 14:13Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, same.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Who wants to sleep when you could be in torpor?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could enter, you could almost die, but not quite.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  But then, then emerge from it stronger with all your same muscles and a slightly stronger pancreas.

• 14:27Rachel Feltman?

  Sounds dope. Have they considered simply letting the squirrels go to space?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Great question.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  I think they might, they might do better than us. You know, we, we should maybe consider just letting the squirrels take the reins on all of it.

• 14:40Rachel Feltman?

  Do we deserve Mars? Or do squirrels deserve Mars?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Squirrels wouldn't be a bad next sentient species to come after us, you know? Like, I often think it'll be raccoons because they almost have opposable thumbs, which seems like a massive advantage.

• 14:54Rachel Feltman?

  That's so true.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  But maybe it'll be squirrels. Maybe we'll have smart, smart squirrels being like squirrels of the future at their squirrel colleges examining human studies, human history, and just being like, well, they made some miscalculations.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll have, they'll have the humans locked in the like room-sized freezers where they can poke and prod us. And I just, I do think squirrels, I mean, I don't know about opposable, but they do have their little squirrel hands. I think they could do some intricate research with those.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could do, they could at least do some knitting.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, tiny squirrel sweaters, squirrels making tiny squirrel sweaters.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  How big are these squirrel sickles? You said it was like a, like a large ice cube or a small frozen animal, but like, does it fit in your hand?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I would say like single, I'm, again, this is audio, so me showing something on a screen is not helping anyone listening to this. But it's like, uh, my hand is pretty small for a human hand and I was comfortably holding one in like, kind of one and a half cupped palms. So yeah, there, I, there, I would say they're, they're honestly like, cause they don't have the huge bushy tail. So it's like, if you took a tree squirrel and you just like chopped off the, the bushy tail, you'd have about the size comparison. And then they're, they, they make themselves very compact in the torpor state. So they're like really as curled up as they could possibly be.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Higher density than I would have imagined in such a small animal.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Okay. Do you, do you want to hear a little bit more about squirrel hibernation?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 16:32Rachel Feltman?

  Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Okay. Or I guess about trying to get people into squirrel hibernation state. So yeah, there's, there's this idea among a certain subset of researchers that, that if we study this, we could maybe do it in people. And as with basically like every bit of science that starts to veer sort of into the sci-fi, we're, we're a little, we're kind of far from making it happen.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Lots of animals hibernate, including a few primate species. There are at least three species of dwarf lemurs on Madagascar that are known to hibernate. Which one scientist told me means that, you know, the blueprint for hibernation is somewhere in our primate bodies. But, but nobody really thinks we're going to be able to safely induce complete and total reversible torpor in humans anytime soon. Instead, the more realistic aim might be something like a drug cocktail that triggers metabolic suppression. So already when we go to sleep, our metabolic rate falls by about 15%. And so the question is like, what if we could double that? And the science is it's getting closer. A handful of labs have really been digging deep with hibernating squirrel research.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  They're pioneering new neuron imaging techniques to get a better sense of how brains are actually changing on like a region by region, neuron by neuron basis to coordinate the whole hibernation symphony. They have been tracking how hormone shifts contribute to hibernation and kind of what chemical messengers are responsible for all of the stuff that's happening in a body of a hibernating animal. Some research from Kelly Drew, the Alaska professor I mentioned before, has keyed in on this one type of cell receptor as a target for triggering torpor. So if you selectively stimulate or block these specific receptors in certain organs, it can either induce or interrupt torpor in the squirrels. And then Drew's lab replicated this in rats and pigs and shows that and they showed that

• 18:26Speaker 02

  the same sort of method could could lower body temperature even in these animals that don't normally hibernate. So it is all it's kind of coming together. And I think kind of the takeaway is if you shoot for decoding squirrel hibernation, you might land among the stars. Yeah, I prewrote some like goofy bits. That's a good one. Thank you all for your polite laughter. That's a good one. And I just like, even if it doesn't, even if hibernation research isn't really going to get us to Neptune in our lifetimes, caveat, it could it could offer a big biomedical boost on Earth on processes like organ transplantation, open heart surgeries, stroke recovery, all things that kind of require cooling the human body.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Better ways to do that safely and effectively can make a big difference. And then Elena Grcheva's lab at Yale, part of what they're working on is is this kind of like malleable appetite suppression activation feature of hibernation. You know, for people undergoing treatments like chemotherapy where appetite becomes super suppressed and it's really hard to eat and maintain healthy body weight. If we could figure out how squirrels get their appetite revved back up during hibernation, we could maybe improve quality of life for for people undergoing certain cancer treatments. And it's It's really a testament to how much fundamental biological research can kind of uncover and unlock. You know, we all, we all know about hibernating animals,

• 19:54Speaker 02

  but I think for me personally, I just went around assuming that I knew what it meant until, until I learned just a little bit more. And there's, there's so much lurking beneath the surface of hibernation and you just have to start burrowing like a ground squirrel.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Oh, nice. Well done. Well done.

• 20:13Rachel Feltman?

  I love that. That was great.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I didn't prepare any puns. I didn't, I didn't realize that part of the show.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  I can, I can try and help you out.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you. Thank you in advance.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Inject some puns. Welcome or unwelcome.

• 20:27Rachel Feltman?

  Puns are always welcome. Please come on. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York, or why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse? We also solve non-car related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 21:19Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And John, tell me some stuff about tuberculosis, please.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, with pleasure. How much time do you have? So it's important to remember that even though we think of tuberculosis, or at least I think, thought of tuberculosis as a disease of like British Romantic poets, not, not as a disease of the present, that it's actually still the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It's curable. It's been curable since the 1950s, but it still kills over a million people a year because we've done a really poor job of getting the cure to the people who need it. And, but in 18th and 19th century, England, as, as England was industrializing, the death rate from tuberculosis was astonishingly high. Like, one, one guy referred to it as the frightful tuberculosis of humanity, which I've always liked as a line.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  And about a one in three people in early 19th century England were dying of tuberculosis. And the statistics were fairly similar in the US as we industrialized. And what we now understand is that industrialization is really closely associated with tuberculosis because tuberculosis thrives in crowded working and living conditions like tenements and crowded factories, and so it was just the perfect recipe for tuberculosis. We didn't know that at the time, so at the time, we thought TB was probably inherited, that like it was a disease that ran in families. And we also thought that it went along with this personality called spez tisica, which is one of my favorite, I don't know if it's Latin or Greek, but one of my favorite foreign language phrases. And that was this idea that like there was a certain personality type associated with

• 22:52Speaker 03

  having tuberculosis, and women especially, this was seen as being very beautiful people, but also in men, like having tuberculosis made you super hot. And also, it made you super sensitive. So people who got tuberculosis tended to be very alive to, you know, the beauty of the fluttering birds and whatnot.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Interesting. Is there like a, is there a BuzzFeed quiz that I could take to find out?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Totally, totally. You probably have spez tisica, you know, just from this story about the squirrels. It showed a lot of empathy for the squirrels, and I feel like that's, that's revealing. So you probably, you probably have it. But, so this, so, so, so that's sort of the milieu in which we're talking here is, is a world in which TB is called consumption because it consumes the body so completely. It causes the, it causes intense stomach pain, and so it's hard to eat, but also it wastes the body away, the disease itself does. And so TB is called consumption, and it's believed to be inherited, and it's associated with hotness and, and kindness and generosity and being super sensitive.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Now, you may have heard of James Watt. We know about James Watt because he created so much power in the world that we actually named a unit of power after him. So we have

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  certain a number of watts in our light bulbs and whatnot. And James Watt was responsible for really important innovations around the steam engine to make steam engines much more efficient so that we could get, you know, fueled, both get more coal because we use steam engines to clear out flooded coal plains, but also to use coal to make steam engines that could make everything from manufacturing clothing to now, you know, manufacturing the squirrel space shuttles that we're going to build for the ground squirrels of the future to go into deep space.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  They're tiny suits.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  They're little tiny suits. All of this is possible because of the Industrial Revolution, right? Like, blueberries in January is a result of the Industrial Revolution. The extent to which the Industrial Revolution has changed our lives is impossible to even get our heads around, I think. But James Watt was a huge part of that. He was a, he also did other things. He also came up with a new way of bleaching textiles, which was great news because before that, we mostly bleached textiles with human urine.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Which isn't the best, in my opinion.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Rachel, you said it right. Like, you just, like, knew that.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, this probably been on a previous episode of the pod.

• 25:33Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I definitely, I talked about the, like, the urine industry that existed

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:38Rachel Feltman?

  back when it was our, like, best bleaching agent. So...

• 25:42Speaker 03

  There was a urine industry.

• 25:43Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Wasn't the best work you could get, but it was work.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  I did get a press release in my email the other day that the, like, first half the subject header was just liquid gold, and I, I, like, didn't open it. Maybe, maybe the urine industry is making a comeback.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Oh, God. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be that surprised. It's all natural, I suppose. But anyway, James Watt came up with a different way of bleaching textiles. He also came up with this fascinating machine that copied sculptures. On one side, it would sort of, like, map the sculpture. And then on the other side, it would recreate the sculpture using, uh, it was really cool. So he, he, he did a bunch of cool stuff, but then in the late nineteenth, late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, he abandoned all his other work because, because he became obsessed with trying to find a cure for consumption. He was like, we have got to cure this. And he thought this partly because his daughter Jessie had died of the disease when she was fifteen and partly because his son Gregory was now sick with the disease. Gregory was a fascinating character in his own right. He, he was very hot, apparently.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  One of his friends called him literally the most beautiful youth I ever saw.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Which is, uh, you know, that's nice.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Who among us wouldn't want to be literally the most beautiful youth that someone ever saw?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  I guess not if it meant that you had to die of the consumption.

• 27:00Rachel Feltman?

  Right. I was like, was it the TB?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Right. What made, what made him so beautiful? Was it natural or was it Maybelline?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  So, anyway, James Watt is trying to figure out a way to deal with consumption. And the, the idea that he comes up with actually makes a ton of sense, not for reasons that, that he knew, but, but it does make a ton of sense. His idea was that you need to decrease the amount of oxygen available to the lungs by in, in feeding the lungs more nitrous oxide, by like forcing nitrous oxide into the lungs. Now, that did not work. Um, the contraption that he invented did not successfully treat tuberculosis, but he was on to something because the, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis is highly aerobic. And so still to this day, it sometimes in, in real emergencies will collapse down a lung

• 27:51Speaker 03

  so that the bacteria can't get access to oxygen so that it starts to die away.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  We used to call it in the early twentieth century, we used to, this, this surgery was done all the time in sanatoria. And we would, um, we would basically collapse a lung down to quote unquote, let it rest. Not that dissimilar from putting it in torpor, I suppose.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. But then, how, how do you manage the fact that humans also need the oxygen?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the other lung would be left inflated. Um, and then the idea is that the one lung would do all the work. James Watt didn't understand that humans need oxygen in order to, um, to be good, I don't think. Um, I don't, I, I don't know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure he didn't know that, or he wouldn't have known that. Um, this is a science podcast though, so someone's going to correct me. It's a catastrophe. I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk back what I just said.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I don't know James Watt's situation re-oxygen.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, not to end the story on a bummer, Gregory Watt ended up dying of tuberculosis because his dad's contraption didn't work and there was no other treatment available at the time. We didn't know about antibiotics. We didn't know about the fact that tuberculosis is caused by microorganisms. And so his son ended up dying like about 75% of people with, uh, who develop active TB and can't get access to treatment. And James Watt was really never the same after he lost his two kids, as you can imagine. Um, it was, uh, it was devastating for him and for his family. So I don't like to end on a bummer note, but unfortunately, the story of tuberculosis is full of bummers.

• 29:28Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I mean, makes sense.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  I, this is, this doesn't have to be in the final cut if it's not, but I've always, I, I am unclear on what like the timeline and progression of a tuberculosis infection is. Cause I have in my head this image of people spending like years

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  in sanatoria, taking the air upstate or whatever, but.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's a real image. Um, people would often like, I, I, I write in the book about this woman who went into a TB sanatorium when she was about three years old and didn't leave until she was 16. And lots of people never left. Um, so it's, it's common for the disease to take years to, uh, make you really sick. And then once you're really, really sick, maybe months or even years to, to die. It is usually, not always, but usually a, a slow moving disease. And the reason for that is really interesting, which is that TB has this thick fatty cell wall. Much, and, and so as a result, it has a much lower replication rate because it takes forever relative to bacteria time to make this thick

• 30:32Speaker 03

  fatty cell wall. And so TB just replicates more slowly than a pathogen like E. coli. Like I think, um, TB doubles about once per day in lab settings and E. coli doubles about once every like 20 minutes.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Sure. Whoa.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  So it's a vastly different kind of bacteria and as a result, we need vastly different ways of treating it. So like if you get a strep throat infection, you take seven to 10 days of antibiotics and you're probably cured from that infection. If you get TB, it takes four to six months of antibiotics, even if you have relatively drug sensitive TB. And then if you have a form of TB that's resistant to some of those drugs, it can take up to 12 or even 18 months of antibiotic treatment to be cured.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Wow. And can I just keep asking?

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Please do. I mean, this is literally my jam. This is what I think about at night.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  How is it transmitted? Like, did James contract TB from his children?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  He didn't, which is weird. And that's one of the reasons why it took us so long to figure out that TB was contagious, because sometimes, like Louis XIII died of tuberculosis. Lots of wealthy, famous people did. Charles Dickens called it "the disease that wealth never warded off," which is especially ironic, given that today it's a disease that wealth pretty much entirely wards off. But it was weird, because like Louis XIII would die of tuberculosis, but then like his wife and his children wouldn't. Or in the case of Louis XIV, his child died of tuberculosis, but he never got it. Why does this happen? Well, we still don't totally understand that. TB is extremely infectious, like, or

• 32:10Speaker 03

  in the sense that if you go, a year of untreated tuberculosis will lead to between 10 and 15 new tuberculosis infections. But there's a lot at work. For one thing, the vast majority of people who get a TB infection will never become sick. They have what we call latent TB, where the body finds a way to control the tuberculosis by surrounding it with white blood cells that we call tubercles, which is one of my favorite words. It's where we get the word tuberculosis from. And so the, in most people who contract TB, the disease will lie dormant for a lifetime. It's only about ten to, ten percent of people who eventually become sick with what we call active TB. And once you even, once you have active TB, the disease's course is extremely unpredictable.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Sometimes you can die within a few months, sometimes you can live with it for decades, or even for a lifetime.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, still, still a lot to learn.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we are, we are pretty far down the line of our understanding of tuberculosis after living with it for 300,000 years, but we, there's still a lot that we don't know and a lot that we don't understand. We don't understand why some people get active tuberculosis. We know there are risk factors for it, like malnutrition is the biggest risk factor. About half of the 10 million people who will get sick with TB this year are also malnourished. Diabetes is a big risk factor, HIV/AIDS infection is a risk factor. But there's, there's still a lot we don't understand about how tuberculosis spreads, why it becomes active, when it becomes active. But we know that we can prevent and cure this disease, and we know we could live in a world without tuberculosis, and I wish we would choose that world. But right now, we're kind of choosing the opposite world.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, very, very relevant and prescient.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, just in the last couple of weeks, we've seen a huge pullback in the overall amount of funding for tuberculosis response, which is especially catastrophic because one of the reasons that it's really important to continue your treatment, like through those four, six, or 12, or however many months, is because if you have, if you have a pause in treatment, you're much more likely to develop drug resistance. So, in the book, I write about one young boy, who's really at the center of the book, this, this kid named Henry, who's trying to survive drug-resistant TB in Sierra Leone. And the reason he developed drug-resistant TB in the first place is that there was a pause in his, in his treatment. And now, we're pausing the treatment for an untold number of people, for tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people.

• 34:36Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, gosh, that both unconscionable, you know, at a a human level and also just a a public health nightmare.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, a really, a really bad public health decision to put us in a situation where we have much more drug resistant tuberculosis floating around and we're giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop resistance, including developing resistance to our best tools against it, our our newest tools against it, which, like, I try not to be an alarmist, but that that does freak me out because a world where we go back to the early 20th century when my great uncle died of tuberculosis, when tuberculosis was was killing so many people, in the early 20th century, there were almost as many hospital beds for tuberculosis patients as there were for all other diseases combined. I do not want to go back to that world.

• 35:22Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, Lauren, were you gonna say something?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say bleak.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, like I said, I don't mean to be a bummer.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  No, it's it's, yeah, it, I'm just imagining a world where that's true and then also we have circulating H5N1 pandemic.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I just want to emphasize that my book is super fun and funny.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  It's a real light, it's a beach read.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  It is, it is, I tried, I tried to make it as much of a beach read as you can make it while still being about tuberculosis.

• 35:53Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, well, if anyone can do it, it's it's you. So a light, but impactful read on a huge public health issue.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Can I ask one question that is not about tuberculosis, but is about the sculpture copying machine?

• 36:13Rachel Feltman?

  I saw, I saw you wanting to be like, wait, freeze frame, tell me about the sculpture.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Like, it was like a mechanical contraption that could translate a three dimensional thing on one side into a replica on the other side?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  That is exactly what it was.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  So you can actually see this at the Science Museum in London. You can see this incredible sculpture making machine. I I just looked it up on the internet just now. And it it was basically, yeah, on one side.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Let me see if I can get a picture of it so that I can actually describe it for you.

• 36:48Rachel Feltman?

  What I'm picturing is like one of those like desk toys where you press your hand into the pins and you get a, you, you know, make a hand shape on the other side through the pins.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, but, but this, this machine also carved the sculptures. It also carved the copy at the same time. So on the one, on the one hand, it would be looking at sort of negative space. And on the other hand, it would be creating positive space. It's called, he called it the equal sculpture machine.

• 37:16Rachel Feltman?

  But like this is, this is stuff that we struggle to achieve even with like complex robotics.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Well, I want to be clear that this was not a great sculpture copying machine.

• 37:27Rachel Feltman?

  Seriously.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not, don't, don't picture, don't picture a 3D printer.

• 37:34Rachel Feltman?

  Okay. I'm still impressed.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  No, no, no, James Watt was an amazing, amazing genius.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  And the fact that he abandoned his work to focus on tuberculosis during the crisis in his family, I think is a real testament to his love for, for those kids.

• 37:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  And the importance of the illness.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:54Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:56Rachel Feltman?

  All right, we're going to take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 38:10Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back and I'm going to share my fact about how if you are, again, very, very lucky, parts of you might become glass one day. Something to hope for. And side note, there is something called the glass delusion, which is definitely the kind of thing I love to talk about and may have even talked about on Weir's Thing before. It peaked in like the 16th century, but does still exist. And basically people start to believe that they're made of glass and could shatter at any moment. But that is not what we're getting into today. We are going to talk about how you can actually turn into glass, or at least parts of you can.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Body goals.

• 38:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, body goals.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Right, it's just the existing beauty standards weren't already unrealistic enough. Now I've got to become glass.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, from glass skin to literal physical solid glass.

• 39:02Rachel Feltman?

  Body. So, back in 2020, researchers described some very unique remains from a victim of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And I think these remains had actually been found in the 60s, but people are still actively investigating specimens from Mount Vesuvius. And there were these glassy black fragments. We're talking like, you know, maybe a couple of centimeters at most, and some pieces even smaller than that, that they pulled out of this unfortunate Vesuvian skull. And back in 2020, they were like, we're pretty sure that these are brain matter, even though they kind of look like obsidian. So that's

• 39:47Rachel Feltman?

  cool and interesting. And they speculated that the brain went through a process called vitrification, which is where extremely high heat followed by rapid cooling can turn a material into glass. And surprisingly, some people were like, you can't just say that somebody's brain turned into glass. You don't know that. That's sort of a rock by somebody's skull. So we're going to get into what they have found in a more recent study. But first, like, a little bit about sort of what we mean when we say this is glass. When we say that something either fully or partially becomes glassy, we just

• 40:26Rachel Feltman?

  mean it's forming a non-crystalline or amorphous solid. And if you're like, oh, like, no big deal then, I thought we meant glass glass. First of all, that is what glass is. Second of all, this would be a big deal because it would mark the only known instance of an animal's tissue being vitrified. There are some rare known instances of maybe plant matter being vitrified, but organic materials being vitrified in general just is not considered very common, mostly because it's like, what has to happen is that

• 41:03Rachel Feltman?

  Things have to solidify before crystallizing, which is very hard for water. So if you're made of mostly water, that pretty much rules out vitrification in almost all circumstances.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  So is the difference between glass and a mineral just that minerals are crystalline solids and glass isn't?

• 41:25Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know that that's the the only difference, but like what makes a mineral become glass is the change in the in the structure. So, yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Okay, because there's I the my very first weirdest thing appearance, I like talked about falcon poop becoming mineralized and like turning into tenunculum and how that like to change the entire course of how we thought about planetary evolution. But so I've heard of poop becoming mineral, but never a brain becoming glass.

• 41:53Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So, you know, sort of petrification, like something becoming stony way more common. Glass, hard to make, especially when there's water involved.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:06Rachel Feltman?

  And so, yeah, usually when people talk about vitrification, it's because of processes that, you know, we carry out using a lot of energy and materials that aren't full of water, like in ceramics. You know, there are different ways you can make ceramics nonporous. A lot of times things are glazed to make them impermeable, which is really important for making food safe objects, because otherwise like water and bacteria and stuff can can get in there. So like porcelain and bone china are examples of vitrified pottery, where basically, you know, the way that they're fired sort of ups the ratio of like glassy structures versus non glassy structures to make it nonporous.

• 42:51Rachel Feltman?

  Also, you know, we see this fun fact in candy making. You know, if you cool sugar slowly, you'll get like rock candy, you'll get crystallized sugar. But if you cool it really rapidly, you can do other cool stuff like cotton candy. So. Sort of glassy.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  So cotton candy is glass, it's like fiberglass.

• 43:13Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's like why it looks so similar to fiberglass is that it's sort of

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Fondue or fiberglass.

• 43:17Rachel Feltman?

  These thin strands of like glassy sugars.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  So I should be eating the insulation in my home.

• 43:23Rachel Feltman?

  No, very bad. Don't do that.

• 43:28Rachel Feltman?

  And there's also a couple of things we do that we call vitrification. You might have heard of the vitrification of nuclear waste. You basically like mix the spent nuclear fuel with like glass making materials like silica. And then you can turn it into an inert glassy thing that, you know, you don't have to worry about it leaching into anything else. And then also now when people do IVF, generally speaking, eggs and embryos are flash frozen with vitrification so that they don't form ice crystals that can damage the cells. So anytime you hear people talking about like cryogenics, they're talking about vitrifying those cells.

• 44:13Rachel Feltman?

  So there are in fact many instances where we turn stuff glassy, but it requires a lot of work. It's very tricky to do. And this is, you know, supposedly an instance where nature did it for us.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Is everything vitrified like the hard shiny texture we associate? Like do embryos and IVF like become hard during that process?

• 44:37Rachel Feltman?

  That's such a good question and I don't have the answer to that. But I do know that the cells are, they're in a glassy state in terms of being solid without being crystallized. So I guess probably yes is the answer. But also we're talking about, you know, such tiny objects that it probably doesn't come up much sort of way there.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess the idea that they have a texture and like I couldn't feel it anyway.

• 45:01Rachel Feltman?

  Right.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  But it's wild that that's reversible.

• 45:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. Takes a lot, you know, took a lot of research to figure out, but unsurprisingly, the success rates are much higher when you use sort of a vitrification process than the other freezing processes that came. Before because again, you know, the big thing you're trying to avoid is cellular damage and water crystallizing is, you know, bad news bears when it comes to trying not to damage cells.

• 45:29Rachel Feltman?

  So in this new study on this guy from the Vesuvius eruptions brain,

• 45:37Rachel Feltman?

  they started by like analyzing the heck out of this crumbly glass to both confirm that it was a brain and figure out what it took to make it all glassy.

• 45:48Rachel Feltman?

  And so first of all, on the proving it's a brain front, they looked at what made up this glassy material and they found mostly carbon and oxygen and other things that brains are made of like proteins and fats. So that was very exciting. But then what was really cool is that when they used, you know, really high powered microscopy on the brain, they found really well-preserved brain structures like neurons and axons. And that really ruled out like other known natural brain preservation instances, like saponification, which Jess talked about on a previous episode.

• 46:33Rachel Feltman?

  I don't think anyone actually looked at this like crumbly rock and said, I think this is a soap brain, like from a bog body. But still, I think the point was there was really kind of unprecedented level of detail in the brain structures they were able to find, you know, looking, looking under very high-powered microscopes, which supports the idea that this was like a very rare, special preservation event. And then they also tested it by heating it up in different ways to show that it acted like a glass. And it did. So that was very exciting. Again, we're getting closer to this is a brain and it's made of glass.

• 47:14Rachel Feltman?

  And once they were satisfied with all that, they decided to try to figure out how this happened. So they were looking at how the material changed at like different heats and being heated at different speeds. And eventually, they landed on almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit as being the fictive temperature, which just means the temperature at which material will turn into glass. So that told them, you know, if you, if you want a human brain to turn into glass, you need it to be at about 510 degrees Celsius, which is almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 47:57Rachel Feltman?

  Though, like I said, it also has to cool down really rapidly, so rapidly that it bypasses the normal crystallization process. But one thing that was interesting about that temperature threshold they found is that it actually ruled out the pyroclastic flow of the eruption as causing this. So that's that stereotypical rush of like gas and rock and ash, the like big scary cloud tumbling out of an eruption. Because it wouldn't have actually gotten hot enough, and even more importantly, maybe it would have lingered too long to create this like rapid cooldown effect.

• 48:40Rachel Feltman?

  So, we know, we're pretty sure this is a brain, we're pretty sure it turned into glass, but how did it happen? Luckily, they have an idea.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  That's so wild, though.

• 48:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. It's absolutely crazy.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Did they replicate this? Have they made glass brains in labs now?

• 48:58Rachel Feltman?

  I don't think they've, they've made glass brains in the lab, but I hope they'll start. So researchers were already pretty sure that there were multiple so-called deadly events on the day Vesuvius erupted, and there had already been theories about a really hot cloud of ash sort of sweeping through before the pyroclastic flow actually arrived. There was one study in 2010 that actually suggested that this like blazing hot ash that was like hot enough to like melt. Objects probably killed most of the people who died, which is, you know, how we sort of got the very evocative remains of people,

• 49:41Rachel Feltman?

  in some cases, sort of still going about their daily business, or, you know, being in bed when this happened, which is what happened to the guy whose brain turned to glass. He was chilling in bed. So these scientists think that a hot cloud of ash, like really, really hot, around 1,000 degrees or higher, briefly surged through the place that this man was sleeping. And then, as it dissipated very quickly, the brain also cooled extremely quickly at a rate of about 1,000 degrees Celsius per second.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  So like, instant, instant.

• 50:16Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, it came and went, which is really wild to me. And I definitely want to see more research on, on sort of the, the dynamics of that. But, you know, it, apparently, it could have been done.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  That's just, it feels that like, even if, it feels like, even if you made a hot brain and then put it in a bucket of ice water, that it wouldn't cool that quickly. Yeah, that's like, it's like half a second of cooling to get below, like, to get the 500 C heat gone.

• 50:49Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Was it really windy? Like, how did that?

• 50:51Rachel Feltman?

  Well, it does.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Was it like snowing?

• 50:54Rachel Feltman?

  No, it was summer. So that's also, I think, a big question left to answer. But the thing is, we know that whatever happened to this guy's brain was weird, even given the set of circumstances that he was in. Because there have been about 2,000 bodies unearthed in the area. And this is the only time we've seen any signs of this, let alone, you know, anything that we can investigate further. So it's very, like, I don't know. I, I've covered a couple of things on weirders thing that come from like, the Journal of Forensics, where it's sort of a like, a weird, like, Final Destination-style death, where the case report is just like, wow, so many things had to happen for this to happen. And I feel like this is sort of the,

• 51:38Rachel Feltman?

  this guy's sort of the original, like, that, that's wild. This'll never happen again.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  What happened to everyone else's brain?

• 51:47Rachel Feltman?

  Well, that is a great question. And they were probably just like cooked in a way that did not lead to them being preserved along with, you know, their, their non-soft tissues. Because another thing that they think, the sort of like perfect symphony of factors that led to this guy's brain being vitrified, is that almost immediately after this rapid heating and cool down, then the pyroclastic flow arrived and he was buried in the like ash and rock of the pyroclastic flow. And if it had been closer to the fictive temperature of the brain, it probably would have messed things up.

• 52:31Rachel Feltman?

  It probably would have just kind of like melted the brain. But it was just cool enough, but it was like, you know, 100 or 200 degrees cooler than the ash cloud that had just come through, that instead it just sort of covered him and made his body more likely to be preserved. And a reason they think that, you know, we didn't see large parts of this guy's body or even his whole brain turn into glass as this, you know, wild set of factors came together, is that it took the protection of his skull to allow some small part of the brain to go through this.

• 53:11Rachel Feltman?

  That like the skull protected the brain enough from the temperature surge that maybe just like the little, most innermost part of the brain didn't instantly cook and was able to go through this process while the rest of him, you know, went through what a body more typically goes through when things are suddenly excruciatingly fatally hot. So basically, this is a wild thing. It'll never happen again. It happened to this one guy.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Never say never.

• 53:42Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I know. Never say never.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  I have a question about that.

• 53:45Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  You began both your tease and this bit by saying, if you're exceptionally lucky, your brain might turn into glass. And I just want to push back on that a little bit.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  I'm not sure that you could qualify this, this person as exceptionally lucky.

• 54:03Rachel Feltman?

  That's fair. That's fair. Relative to um, the other, other 2000 plus uh, people uh, around him. Um, I would say a cool thing happened, but.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  A cool thing, a rare.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Really hot and then rapidly cool thing happened.

• 54:19Rachel Feltman?

  Rapidly cool thing. Um, yeah, but it's true. This is obviously not actually a lucky event. But it is very lucky for these scientists who are very, uh, very excited to figure out how this could have possibly happened. What I love about this is that they have figured out like what circumstances allowed this to happen. And it's still sort of not enough. They're like, there's still, like you said, like, did a breeze come through at exactly the right moment? Um, clearly this was even weirder than just the way this volcano erupted and the way the human skull works. Allowed this to happen. Clearly there was like a Rube Goldberg machine of circumstances, many of which we'll probably never know.

• 55:02Rachel Feltman?

  Um, but it, it's cool that it happened.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Your brain can turn to glass.

• 55:08Rachel Feltman?

  There's a chance.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm glad you clarified it wasn't the whole brain because initially I was like, oh man, a few centimeters of glass. That's kind of a dig at this guy. A whole brain, just a couple of bits.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  But I'm also bummed that it's not the whole brain because I was envisioning that it would be like a really cool like desk toy object. Glass brain.

• 55:27Rachel Feltman?

  Totally. It does sound like it would be like a very, a very beautiful, um, the, the sort of thing you would get at like a, a curio shop. Um, in New York City for thousands of dollars.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Conversation starter.

• 55:41Rachel Feltman?

  Um, I will say I'll, I'll link to, you know, more info on, on pop dot com slash weird as always. And there'll be some photos and it does look really cool, very zoomed in it because it just looks like, you know, volcanic glass. Um, it's not brain shaped, which would obviously be even cooler. Uh, but apparently, you know, the researchers have noted it's very crumbly. It's very fragile. Even just like in getting the samples and handling them that they've like broken apart a lot. Uh, so. It's possible that there was more of like a respectable chunk of recognizable brain in glass form at some point, but it was, you know, damaged by the time we got there. Or maybe it was truly just like this tiny, tiny little bit,

• 56:20Rachel Feltman?

  which would make sense, given how apparently absolutely bananas unlikely this whole process was. But yeah, that's, that's, that's the story of the glass brain from this guy at Mount Vesuvius. So something to hope for. If, if you end up being studied by archaeologists,

• 56:44Rachel Feltman?

  you know, thousands of years from now.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna root against that outcome overall personally, but I-

• 56:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, that's fair. I hope we have archaeologists a couple thousand years from now.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  That'd be a huge win.

• 56:54Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I would donate my brain to glassification if that's what it meant.

• 57:01Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I always tell people I'm working on my bog body. I'm, I'm ready for somebody. I don't even need, there's the reason for the study they're doing to be super compelling. Just like bog me up, baby. I'm-

• 57:15Speaker 02

  The thing about being a bog body is you do get to keep your hair in kind of like an incredible and luscious way.

• 57:21Rachel Feltman?

  Which is pretty primo.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  There's a lot of upsides.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  There's just the one major downside.

• 57:27Rachel Feltman?

  Sure, sure.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Of being a bog- yeah, but you're, you're gonna be a body eventually.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Right, no, but that, it still seems like an undesirable outcome to me.

• 57:34Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Like, just because it's inevitable doesn't mean that I'm, I'm thrilled about it.

• 57:38Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Why, why didn't, I mean, I feel like I should know this, but why didn't everyone who was in Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvius eruption not just turn to ash? Like, isn't that like hotter than a cremation oven sort of temperatures?

• 57:53Rachel Feltman?

  So I think a lot of people were probably kinda just turned to ash or at least destroyed really quickly. One of the reasons scientists are so interested in the victims of Vesuvius is that it was just such an extreme event that exactly where you were at any given moment had a really big impact, not just on how you died, but what happened to you afterwards. I think a lot of people, what they know about Vesuvius kind of begins and ends- With those, again, super evocative images of people who just fell where they stood and were preserved there. What you're seeing when you look at those bodies are actually plaster casts. And those come from people who were killed by the rushes of hot ash and gas that I mentioned, which caused instant death from thermal shock in some cases and suffocation in others.

• 58:37Rachel Feltman?

  And also covered those people in layers of ash, which then cooled down and hardened faster than the bodies decomposed. So that left behind these really eerie, negative spaces in the shape of those people. And then in the late 1800s, an archaeologist started filling those cavities with plaster, which seems kind of like a wild thing for an archaeologist to decide to do. But it did make these really interesting and spooky casts of those victims. But then some people who were further away, or I don't know, I think maybe just happened to avoid those blasts of hot ash and gas for who knows what reason, maybe the way the wind was blowing. They were killed by falling debris.

• 59:20Rachel Feltman?

  And some were even killed by earthquakes that happened later. So a lot of those folks were trapped under rubble in their homes and perhaps not exposed to as much heat or ash. So that made their preservation process very different. And then you have some people who were trapped in their homes as temperatures surged. Or in one case, there were a bunch of people who were in these clusters of boathouses, possibly because they were trying to escape the city. And those buildings basically turned into ovens. And there's a lot of debate about exactly what happened to their bodies and how quickly, because the heat was so sudden and extreme. But the general consensus is that their soft tissues were destroyed very quickly.

• 1:00:04Rachel Feltman?

  We do still see a lot of skeletal remains from them. And scientists still aren't totally sure why some of them aren't like totally charred. Again, it kind of speaks to like the very specific thermodynamics of this incredibly intense event that happened. It's obviously pretty gnarly, but it's kind of surprising after all these years how much scientists don't know. There's a lot of science still to do. So yeah, it's very cool stuff, or very, very hot stuff.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Hot and then cool.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Cold squirrels, hot brains.

• 1:00:39Rachel Feltman?

  Tuberculosis. We had it all today. Yeah, Lauren, when you were talking about safely rapidly cooling cells, I was like, well, I'm about to talk about unsafely rapidly cooling cells.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Maybe the squirrel scientists and the archaeologists at Vesuvius should collapse.

• 1:00:57Rachel Feltman?

  They should get together.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they should.

• 1:00:58Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, there's some overlap, for sure.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Figure some stuff out.

• 1:01:02Rachel Feltman?

  John, thanks so much for coming on today. This has been great. Would you remind our listeners what your book is called so that they can go find it?

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  My book is called Everything is Tuberculosis, and it's been so great to be with you. Thank you for giving me the chance to be on a podcast I enjoy so much.

• 1:01:18Rachel Feltman?

  Thank you so much. That means a lot.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Bellhoff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.